More on Bergman.

"Thanks to the folks at Chicago Cinema Forum, this weekend we'll get a chance to take a crash course in Bergman," writes Rob Christopher at the Chicagoist. "Between Saturday and Sunday, no less than five Bergman features will screen as well as the Chicago theatrical premiere of the documentary Bergman Complete."

Updated through 8/13.

The Economist: "He needed light in small increments: flaring and fading in a paraffin lamp, or dimming with extraordinary slowness on a face (as it dimmed on Liv Ullmann's face in Persona) until only a silhouette was left. From childhood, he had got up at six and noted the track of light on the wall opposite his window. After two months of darkness, a thread would reappear in January."

Shyam Benegal in Outlook India: "To me, even more than Antonioni, Bergman was one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century."

A little something from me at the Reeler: "[I]f we're to peg Antonioni and Bergman as modernists... there's something missing: the city."

"Near the end of the last millennium, I decided to do something difficult and convoluted and thoroughly silly," confesses Jim Emerson. "On this particular occasion I determined to figure out which 100 movies were the most highly regarded at the close of the century.... came up with some complex point scale for rating the movies by the awards and honors they had received, using a mixture of domestic and international, popular and critical sources.... Point of interest: Bergman had three films on the list: Persona (22), Wild Strawberries (66), and Fanny and Alexander (84). Antonioni had one: L'Avventura (8)."

"Relatives of legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman were Monday still shrouding all details of his burial in secrecy more than a week after his death," reports the DPA.

Updates: Online viewing tips. "Mention Bergman to anyone who knows him only by reputation and they'll probably make a laboured joke about the supposedly slow, depressive and morbid atmosphere of his films," blogs David Bennun for the Guardian. "Blame the many Bergman parodies (scroll down). Bergman's films have become part of popular culture not by being viewed, but by being mocked. And this in itself is a remarkable achievement: to make cinema so distinctive that even people who haven't seen it can instantly identify a lampoon of it."

The staff at IFC News lists "ten (and more) songs, shorts, movies, shows and novels that pay tribute to the [Bergman and Antonioni's] work."

"The Silence signaled the filmmaker's wary involvement in the social and aesthetic currents of the 1960s; it led directly to his enigmatic masterpiece Persona (1966) and Shame (1968), an impressive meditation on the fate of civilians during wartime," writes the Voice's J Hoberman, who has "several times taught The Silence in the context of post–World War II poetic horror and pop existentialism (including [Sam] Fuller's Shock Corridor). The Silence is morbid and despairing, but such consummate filmmaking cannot be depressing. Bergman himself saw The Silence as almost hopeful, telling one reporter that it suggests 'Life only has as much meaning and importance as one attributes to it oneself.' Meaning and importance are things Bergman's films never lacked and his oeuvre has in abundance."

"The two major themes in Bergman's mature filmmaking - the silence of God and the destiny of the 'corroded' artist - which are at the center of such screen works as The Seventh Seal, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence, Persona, The Hour of the Wolf and Shame often faced a critique at home that was colored by the intellectual voices of the politicised 1960s," writes Birgitta Steene. "After the opening of Winter Light in 1963, one Stockholm reviewer exclaimed in exasperation: 'Of what concern is the individual Ingmar Bergman's religious self-reflections hither and thither.' And when The Hour of the Wolf and Shame premiered in 1967-68, a member of the Swedish Academy, Lars Forssell, wondered if Bergman might not be guilty of 'some sort of constitutional blindness, a reflection of a 19th century individualistic view of the artist that began with Werther and ended with Oscar Wilde,' someone who was guilty of 'an overrating of the artistic self that seems completely old-fashioned.'" But: "When Bergman returned to Sweden after his exile, he was greeted as the prodigal son."

Also at openDemocracy, Roger Scruton: "[E]ven at his most humorous, Bergman takes a religious view of human beings, as creatures who are not merely in the world, as animals are, but also aspiring to make sense of it. Wild Strawberries shows that we achieve that aspiration when we look upon all that has happened to us, and accept it in a condition of forgiveness. That very Christian theme constantly recurs in Bergman's most important films. It may be one reason why he has fallen out of fashion; but it is also a reason why he will very soon be in fashion again, and appreciated for what he was: the man who brought cinema into the fold of western art."

About that Bergman weekend in Chicago. Jonathan Rosenbaum will be introducing Sawdust and Tinsel and blogs at the Chicago Reader's On Film about Bergman Complete: "Having more recently seen the second part of the Bergman documentary being shown, devoted exclusively to Bergman's prodigious career as a theater director - which I would argue (and Bergman himself maintained) is more important than his career as a filmmaker - I can strongly recommend it as an eye-opener. And if I had to recommend only one film to see by Bergman, I'd probably pick Persona - though I hasten to add, with some embarrassment, that I still haven't seen Fanny and Alexander, which many regard as Bergman's masterpiece, and which I'm planning to catch up with this weekend."

"Bergman's father was ultra-right wing, and both the future filmmaker and his brother were Nazi sympathizers," the Boston Globe's Ty Burr reminds us. "He never formally apologized - nor was he asked to - and there was no PR firestorm as there was over Günter Grass last year. Was Bergman "given a free pass"? The answer's complex.... But should he have apologized? I think he did - with his movies."

Updates, 8/8: "We who revered those great artists, we who sat stunned and spellbound before their masterpieces - what have we achieved?" asks the ever-contentious Camille Paglia in Salon. "Aside from Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, is there a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman's The Seventh Seal or Persona? Perhaps only George Lucas's multilayered, six-film Star Wars epic can genuinely claim classic status, and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science fiction."

"I have long known and admired the Chicago Reader's film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, but his New York Times op-ed attack on Ingmar Bergman ('Scenes from an Overrated Career,' 8/4/07) is a bizarre departure from his usual sanity," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "It says more about Rosenbaum’s love of stylistic extremes than it does about Bergman and audiences. Who else but Rosenberg could actually believe that Bergman had what Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson lacked, 'the power to entertain - which often meant a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habits?' In what parallel universe is the power to entertain defined in that way?" Via Jim Emerson, who quotes from some of Rosenbaum's responses to other arguments that have been aired during that stormy discussion on the a_film_by list.

Updates, 8/9: "Hour of the Wolf has become a sort of signifier to me," writes Mike at Esotika Erotica Psychotica. "Bergman is often the film-snobs God, and there's nothing the film snob likes to do more than to put down genre films. Hour of the Wolf became my hat-trick; it was a genre film that the director who epitomized 'ART HOUSE' himself had made."

Josef Braun has DVD recommendations in the Vue Weekly.

Harry Tuttle carries on responding to Jonathan Rosenbaum's NYT piece: "[I]f we replace 'Bergman' [with] 'Godard' in this op-ed piece, I would probably agree with everything he says about the intellectual hype, the idolatry around JLG, the ego, the absence of form invention, the fakery of his gimmicks, the fading of his aura, the overrated canonization. And that's bogus.... There are more credible ways to propose a re-evaluation of a long time resident at the cinema pantheon."

"[E]x-Globie Thomas Garvey takes my own Sunday piece on Bergman and Antonioni to task on his HubReview blog for not insisting on their greatness strongly enough and for cutting the MySpace generation slack for not knowing their movie history (or worse, not caring to know)," blogs the Boston Globe's Ty Burr. "He makes some excellent points, but his dismissal of a younger generation's tastes is awfully broad, bordering on plain cranky."

Ted Pigeon has a terrific entry on learning about Bergman and Antonioni over the past weeks and days via blogging and online discussions, "the likes of which few newspaper or magazine articles - barring perhaps the New York Times - can replicate."

Update, 8/10: "The essentially forward-looking Bergman and Antonioni would be mildly appalled at the idea that their deaths had closed the door on a particular strain of filmmaking," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman:

Bergman was 89 when he died, Antonioni 94, yet old age had not diminished their desire to remain alert and alive to the persistent potential of cinema. Bergman made it his business to keep abreast of modern film, shipping prints of the latest releases to his personal cinema in a converted barn on his island retreat of Fårö. When I visited the Swedish Film Institute in 2003, Katinka Faragó, a close friend and colleague of the director, told me: "He sees every single metre of film shot in Sweden, and as much of what's made in the rest of the world as he can. And he's never shy of encouraging younger filmmakers." Among latter-day titles that the master considered masterpieces were the 1998 Show Me Love (aka Fucking Åmål), by his countryman Lukas Moodysson, and François Ozon's Under the Sand (2000). Lars von Trier and, perhaps surprisingly, Steven Spielberg were also recipients of his lavish praise.

Updates, 8/11: David Bordwell notes that Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his reply to Roger Ebert's response to the former's NYT oped - deep breath - he refers to one of David Bordwell's books, "where I make the case that Dreyer experimented with cinematic space (and time). Right: I wrote a book. It takes a book to make such a case. It would take a book to explain and back up in an intellectually satisfying way the charges that Jonathan makes." Comments on popular journalism and responses to several of JR's other points follow - and then: "I'll try to explore just one of the issues Jonathan raises but can't pursue: the question of how stylistically innovative Bergman was." Then comes a valuable primer (with links to earlier entries) on a general arc of the evolution of style in cinema that stretches from deep ranges of focus to flatter tableaus offered by longer lenses and widescreen. As for Bergman, "It seems that in most respects he went along with the general trends.... But Bergman did innovate somewhat, I think. Most obviously, he sometimes had recourse to the suffocating frontal close-up," but what seems even more innovative at least to me is the sequence from Persona, "with Elisabeth Vogler apparently quite oblivious to her husband's mating with Alma, [which] definitely 'challenges conventional film-going habits' - or at least conventional ways we read a scene. It seems to combine the deep-space, big-foreground scheme of the 1940s with the tight close-ups of his early work, and instead of specifying space it undermines it. We have to ask if what happens in the background is Elisabeth's hallucination." A discussion of Antonioni follows and the entry wraps with a "bestiary of stylists."

"I've said it before to people who have a romanticized view of the artist and hold creation sacred: In the end, your art doesn't save you," writes Woody Allen in the New York Times:

I have joked about art being the intellectual's Catholicism, that is, a wishful belief in an afterlife. Better than to live on in the hearts and minds of the public is to live on in one's apartment, is how I put it. And certainly Bergman's movies will live on and will be viewed at museums and on TV and sold on DVDs, but knowing him, this was meager compensation, and I am sure he would have been only too glad to barter each one of his films for an additional year of life....

To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man's dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: "Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can't figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?" or "You think it will be interesting to make a movie where the camera never moves an inch and the actors just enter and exit frame? Or would people just laugh at me?"...

Bergman, for all his quirks and philosophic and religious obsessions, was a born spinner of tales who couldn’t help being entertaining even when all on his mind was dramatizing the ideas of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard....

I learned from his example to try to turn out the best work I’m capable of at that given moment, never giving in to the foolish world of hits and flops or succumbing to playing the glitzy role of the film director, but making a movie and moving on to the next one.

"[I]f you only see one Ingmar Bergman movie in your life, you should see Fanny and Alexander," advises the Guardian's Xan Brooks. "And as luck would have it, the film has just been re-released."

Update, 8/13: "These are the eyes of a lonely man, who has spent his life fighting to escape his loneliness.... His laughter was resounding. He had just put the worst catastrophe of his life behind him. On January 30, 1976, he was escorted out of rehearsals in the Stockholm Royal Theatre by the police and charged with tax evasion. While in custody he suffered a nervous breakdown and tried to take his life." Signandsight translates André Müller's recollection of a meeting with Bergman for Die Weltwoche.

Posted by dwhudson at August 7, 2007 4:44 AM